Highlights
- Author and Illustrator Gabrielle Wang will tour Australia over the next two years as the seventh Australian children’s literature laureate
- Ms Wang says she will foster cultural awareness and pride among schoolchildren in her new role
- The Chinese Australian has published 20 books, many featuring Asian faces as main characters in a Western setting
The wee hours of the morning are a productive time of day for Gabrielle Wang.
The Melbourne-based children’s author and illustrator had a strange dream in 1999, which metamorphosised and became her inspiration for her first book The Garden of Empress Cassia.
Prior to the vision, she said she didn’t even know she had the capability to write.
Twenty children’s books and around the same time decades later, Ms Wang went to sleep one evening in early March only to be woken up by racing thoughts.
Earlier that day, she had received a phone call about an offer to become the next Australian children’s literature laureate, a two-year position to promote the transformational power of reaching, creativity and story.
Shocked she had been nominated and after accepting the role nervously, she wrote down her ideas on her phone at 2am and woke up the next morning to find that she had written out a whole program, including a theme, on what she wanted to achieve as laureate.
Gabrielle Wang giving a book talk to schoolchildren. Source: Supplied
“It’s a huge role and I had never thought of myself worthy of it,” Ms Wang said.
The shock of being nominated
The children’s literature laureate is a role hand-picked by industry professionals.
Past laureates have included Alison Lester, Jackie French and Morris Gleitzman.
Ms Wang says she doesn’t know why she was nominated but suspects having written 20 books for children spanning all school ages over 20 years may have something to do with it.
She writes picture books and middle grade novels for children aged between eight and 12 and is behind one young adult novel.
Ms Wang says she believes her heritage may have been another factor.
As a fourth generation Chinese Australian with ancestry that harks back the gold rush, she has been talking about diversity, imagination, stories, reading and “the importance of all those things” throughout her entire career.
Gabrielle Wang as a child in Australia with her grandfather. Source: Supplied
On a mission to tackle same issues Wang faced as a child
Ms Wang says she is prepared to go beyond her role as the next children’s laureate.
She says her drive comes from insight she received from teachers during the pandemic while she delivered talks and workshops to schoolchildren.
Several of the schools she visited had populations that consisted of 80 to 90 per cent students from Asian backgrounds.
During workshop breaks, she was shocked and saddened to hear through teachers that students were “not happy being Asian” and “not proud of being Chinese”.
“Because that was how I felt [growing up], but years and years ago when Australia was very racist,” she said.
“Australia is an amazing place. There’s so much diversity [now]. They should not feel like that."
Gabrielle Wang's childhood best friend Wendy. Source: Supplied
Ms Wang said she believes the latest wave of anti-Asian sentiment among Chinese schoolchildren came about due to Covid-19, although “it’s been anti-Chinese ever since the gold rush in the 1800s.”
She says people in Australia calling the virus the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” haven’t helped Asian children overcome identity problems.
Neither would have the physical violence against Asian people living in Melbourne at the start of the pandemic, she adds.
“And that’s terrible and of course, these Asian children see that [and are affected]. It’s very sad,” she said.
Memories of not fitting in among white Anglo children in Australia runs so deep Ms Wang based The Garden of Empress Cassia on it.
Although it’s fictional, Ms Wang says the book is almost autobiographical and deals with a lot of a problems she faced growing up as a child.
Gabrielle Wang's first book, The Garden of Empress Cassia, is loosely based on her childhood. Source: Supplied
The central Asian characters across all of Wang’s books
Ms Wang says when she was a child growing up in the 60s, there were no children’s books that featured Asian characters in the Western setting.
She made a point to turn this trend around in her future work.
I definitely wanted to write a book that I would have wanted to have read when I was a child.
Many of Ms Wang’s books, such as Ting Ting the Ghosthunter and A Ghost in My Suitcase, feature Chinese faces as main characters.
“In order to feel like you belong, you need to see yourselves in stories,” she said.
Since then, the themes in her stories have evolved but belonging, inclusivity, diversity and pride are recurring.
Ms Wang says her books’ characters start off by not being proud of who they are and having a lot of self-doubt.
Gabrielle Wang with her childhood friends and siblings dressed up as cowboys. Source: Supplied
“By the end of the book, because it’s for children, they are stronger. They know their purpose,” she said.
Ms Wang says her love for writing for children stems from her own experience as a self-confessed “sad” child growing up.
She says she can help an initially sad character work through all their problems, which were unmistakably Wang’s own problems as a child, and then have a happy ending.
Wang’s hope as laureate
Ms Wang says she is particularly excited about visiting regional Australia where schoolchildren may not get the opportunity to meet authors and illustrators as much as their city counterparts.
She says she hopes children from diverse backgrounds feel a sense of hope after reading her books.
“I didn’t write these stories to teach or to be pedantic. I write them because that’s how I felt when I was a child,” she said.
Gabrielle Wang giving a talk to Australian schoolchildren. Source: Supplied
“Even if you’re not Chinese, even if you’re from another culture, it doesn’t matter,” she added.
Ms Wang says she feels a major part of being the laureate is so that children, who might be Asian or might be of a different ethnicity, look up and “not see a white face.”
“That’s part of the reason why I’m so glad that I was nominated and appointed to this role, because Australia is not just white,” she said.
Ms Wang will travel to all Australian states and territories as laureate for 2022-23. Her theme is Imagine a Story.
